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While I enjoyed playing Fallout 4, I was really annoyed with how it forced you into a specific path that lead inexorably towards a very specific ending no matter, as you say, what you do. At the end, you have just two options: You can join the institute, or make war with them. I actually really didn't care about this faction and wanted to get out of that storyline, but that's what the game offers you. Of course many games lead you to a specific denouement, which is typically one where you've defeated all the bad guys and win. But those games don't make any pretenses about making choices, whereas Fallout does. I was really impressed with how many choices you had in Baldur's Gate 3. They definitely recorded an insane amount of dialogue just to cover all the possibilities. But I did find myself annoyed with the ending here, too, which only allows two choices at the end. If there are two choices to make, it's basically the same as one, because the story just stops there. I'd rather games stop pretending. Don't pretend that there are so many gray areas. Just let the good guys win over the bad guys. An alternative approach for such a game would be to have the decision tree be oriented around a kind of moral compass throughout, and your deeds decide what you can do. So if you keep killing or betraying people, you become more evil, maybe physically deteriorating into a kind of ghoul, while normal people start to fear you and refuse to barter or make allegiances. But as you get more evil, you gain access to eldritch abilities, make friends with monsters, and so on. There may be a point where you can make amends and return from evil, or vice versa, but at some point there's a point of no return where the final trajectory has been decided. There are some games that have some something like this, where you have a "reputation" among the good guys that you can lose by doing misdeeds. Not sure if exactly what I describe has been done, however. |
[1] https://dishonored.fandom.com/wiki/Emily_Kaldwin#Emily's_Dra...